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Notes on Life & Letters

by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #1143 · 469,050 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Notes on Life & Letters

Author: Joseph Conrad


        
Release date: December 1, 1997 [eBook #1143]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Original publication: J. M. Dent, 1921

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1143

Credits: Transcribed from the 1921 J. M. Dent edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS ***






Transcribed from the 1921 J. M. Dent edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





NOTES ON LIFE & LETTERS


Contents:

Author's note

PART I--Letters

BOOKS--1905.
HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905
ALPHONSE DAUDET--1898
GUY DE MAUPASSANT--1904
ANATOLE FRANCE--1904
TURGENEV--1917
STEPHEN CRANE--A NOTE WITHOUT DATES--1919
TALES OF THE SEA--1898
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA--1898
A HAPPY WANDERER--1910
THE LIFE BEYOND--1910
THE ASCENDING EFFORT--1910
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS--AN APPRECIATION--1907

PART II--Life

AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905
THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919
A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM--1916
POLAND REVISITED--1915
FIRST NEWS--1918
WELL DONE--1918
TRADITION--1918
CONFIDENCE--1919
FLIGHT--1917
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE _TITANIC_--1912
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE
_TITANIC_--1912
PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS--1914
A FRIENDLY PLACE




AUTHOR'S NOTE


I don't know whether I ought to offer an apology for this collection
which has more to do with life than with letters.  Its appeal is made to
orderly minds.  This, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up,
which, from the nature of things, cannot be regarded as premature.  The
fact is that I wanted to do it myself because of a feeling that had
nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of
the small (but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this
volume.  Of course it may be said that I might have taken up a broom and
used it without saying anything about it.  That, certainly, is one way of
tidying up.

But it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this
matter as removable rubbish.  All those things had a place in my life.
Whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on the
shelf--this shelf--I cannot say, and, frankly, I have not allowed my mind
to dwell on the question.  I was afraid of thinking myself into a mood
that would hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing, whatever may be
the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man.

And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in
no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year '20, a thin
array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: Conrad
literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial.
Well, yes!  A one-man show--or is it merely the show of one man?

The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things
that have passed away, will be Conrad _en pantoufles_.  It is a
constitutional inability.  _Schlafrock und pantoffeln_!  Not that!  Never!
. . . I don't know whether I dare boast like a certain South American
general who used to say that no emergency of war or peace had ever found
him "with his boots off"; but I may say that whenever the various
periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the
trumpet of personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of
the past, I always tried to pull on my boots first.  I didn't want to do
it, God knows!  Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer my thanks here,
made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery.  Well, yes!
Bribery?  What can you expect?  I never pretended to be better than the
people in the next street, or even in the same street.

This volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is as near
as I shall ever come to _deshabille_ in public; and perhaps it will do
something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more
than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the
process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not
because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that cannot be
helped: because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks with
that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have observed in the
ticking of the hall clock at home.  For reasons like that.  Yes!  It
recedes.  And this was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to
my own eyes.

The section within this volume called Letters explains itself, though I
do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence.  It claims
nothing in its defence except the right of speech which I believe belongs
to everybody outside a Trappist monastery.  The part I have ventured, for
shortness' sake, to call Life, may perhaps justify itself by the
emotional sincerity of the feelings to which the various papers included
under that head owe their origin.  And as they relate to events of which
everyone has a date, they are in the nature of sign-posts pointing out
the direction my thoughts were compelled to take at the various cross-
roads.  If anybody detects any sort of consistency in the choice, this
will be only proof positive that wisdom had nothing to do with it.
Whether right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only
adds a deeper shade to its inherent mystery.  The appearance of
intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight is merely the
result of the arrangement of words.  The logic that may be found there is
only the logic of the language.  But I need not labour the point.  There
will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive the absence of all
wisdom from these pages.  But I believe sufficiently in human sympathies
to imagine that very few will question their sincerity.  Whatever
delusions I may have suffered from I have had no delusions as to the
nature of the facts commented on here.  I may have misjudged their
import: but that is the sort of error for which one may expect a certain
amount of toleration.

The only paper of this collection which has never been published before
is the Note on the Polish Problem.  It was written at the request of a
friend to be shown privately, and its "Protectorate" idea, sprung from a
strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was shaped by the
actual circumstances of the time.  The time was about a month before the
entrance of Roumania into the war, and though, honestly, I had seen
already the shadow of coming events I could not permit my misgivings to
enter into and destroy the structure of my plan.  I still believe that
there was some sense in it.  It may certainly be charged with the
appearance of lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of
many stones; but my object was practical and I had to consider warily the
preconceived notions of the people to whom it was implicitly addressed,
and also their unjustifiable hopes.  They were unjustifiable, but who was
to tell them that?  I mean who was wise enough and convincing enough to
show them the inanity of their mental attitude?  The whole atmosphere was
poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible.
They were also the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made
their strength.  For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I
was careful not to allude to their character because I did not want the
Note to be thrown away unread.  And then I had to remember that the
impossible has sometimes the trick of coming to pass to the confusion of
minds and often to the crushing of hearts.

Of the other papers I have nothing special to say.  They are what they
are, and I am by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed of
insignificant indiscretions.  And as to their appearance in this form I
claim that indulgence to which all sinners against themselves are
entitled.

J. C.
1920.




PART I--LETTERS


BOOKS--1905.


I.


"I have not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have
forgotten what they were about."

These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a
hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat of justice, by a civic
magistrate.  The words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and
importance far above the words of other mortals, because our municipal
rulers more than any other variety of our governors and masters represent
the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue of the community.  This
generalisation, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of eternal
justice (and recent friendship), does not apply to the United States of
America.  There, if one may believe the long and helpless indignations of
their daily and weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to
be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort.  But this by the way.  My
concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament and the
average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered by a civic
magistrate obviously without fear and without reproach.

I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence.  "I
have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and if I
have read them I have forgotten."  This is excellent caution.  And I like
his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity.  As
a reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not
difficult to believe.  Many books have not been read; still more have
been forgotten.  As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is
strikingly effective.  Calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular
mind, so familiar with all forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power
to stir up a subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought--and what
greater force can be expected from human speech?  But it is in
naturalness that this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is
nothing more natural than for a grave City Father to forget what the
books he has read once--long ago--in his giddy youth maybe--were about.

And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as
novels.  I proceed thus cautiously (following my illustrious example)
because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible
without reproach, I confess at once that I have not read them.

I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read
them, I never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition
sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they are
about.  But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in
their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy of regard,
admiration, and compassion.

Especially of compassion.  It has been said a long time ago that books
have their fate.  They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man.
They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory--of severe
justice and senseless persecution--of calumny and misunderstanding--the
shame of undeserved success.  Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's
creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very
thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to
truth, and our persistent leaning towards error.  But most of all they
resemble us in their precarious hold on life.  A bridge constructed
according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a
long, honourable and useful career.  But a book as good in its way as the
bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth.  The art of
their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life.
Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity
of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more than all
others under the menace of an early death.  Sometimes their defects will
save them.  Sometimes a book fair to see may--to use a lofty
expression--have no individual soul.  Obviously a book of that sort
cannot die.  It can only crumble into dust.  But the best of books
drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the
brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy
is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.

No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas
of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of
drugs.  This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life,
but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable,
unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes
and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on
beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change
their form--often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.


II.


Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious claim
on our compassion.  The art of the novelist is simple.  At the same time
it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be
obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one
pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the
artist.  After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking
except perhaps to the divinely gifted.  In truth every novelist must
begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can
honestly believe.  This world cannot be made otherwise than in his own
image: it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious, and yet
it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the
thoughts and the sensations of his readers.  At the heart of fiction,
even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if
only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in
the novels of Dumas the father.  But the fair truth of human delicacy can
be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; and the comical, appalling truth of
human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the
monstrous world created by Balzac.  The pursuit of happiness by means
lawful and unlawful, through resignation or revolt, by the clever
manipulation of conventions or by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the
latest scientific theory, is the only theme that can be legitimately
developed by the novelist who is the chronicler of the adventures of
mankind amongst the dangers of the kingdom of the earth.  And the kingdom
of this earth itself, the ground upon which his individualities stand,
stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record.  To
encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat; and even
to attempt it deliberately with serious intention, not from the senseless
prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable ambition.  For it
requires some courage to step in calmly where fools may be eager to rush.
As a distinguished and successful French novelist once observed of
fiction, "C'est un art _trop_ difficile."

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his
task.  He imagines it more gigantic than it is.  And yet literary
creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no
value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of
all the more distinct forms of action.  This condition is sometimes
forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is
inclined to lay a claim of exclusive superiority for his own amongst all
the other tasks of the human mind.  The mass of verse and prose may
glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of
human effort it has no special importance.  There is no justificative
formula for its existence any more than for any other artistic
achievement.  With the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten,
without, perhaps, leaving the faintest trace.  Where a novelist has an
advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege
of freedom--the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his
innermost beliefs--which should console him for the hard slavery of the
pen.


III.


Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a
novelist.  To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of some
romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own
inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which, after
inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of
distinguished ancestors.  It is a weakness of inferior minds when it is
not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would
seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school.  Such, for
instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet
of Naturalism.  But Stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of
his freedom.  Stendhal's mind was of the first order.  His spirit above
must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation.  For
the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides
behind the literary formulas.  And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous.
He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit
of fearless liberty.

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the
freedom of moral Nihilism.  I would require from him many acts of faith
of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope,
it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and
renunciation.  It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and
inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.  We are inclined to
forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as
distinguished from emotional, humility.  What one feels so hopelessly
barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance.  It seems as if the
discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in
the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
writers.  That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach
seriously the art of fiction.  It gives an author--goodness only knows
why--an elated sense of his own superiority.  And there is nothing more
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his
feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted
moments of creation.

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the
world is good.  It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so.  If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist
who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the
first condition of his calling.  To have the gift of words is no such
great matter.  A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a
hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other
qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either
one or the other.  Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred
thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would
ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a
tender recognition to their obscure virtues.  I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors.  I
would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose
fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as
ridiculous or terrible.  I would wish him to look with a large
forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the
outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social
status, even their professions.  The good artist should expect no
recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil
can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean
anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their
evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes.  I
would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving
observation while he grows in mental power.  It is in the impartial
practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art
can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this
or that particular method of technique or conception.  Let him mature the
strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is
his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his
inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows
nothing.  And I would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come
sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has almost
equalled the greatness of his dream.  For what else could give him the
serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing delightful and
human, the virtue, the rectitude and sagacity of his own City, declaring
with simple eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript Father: "I have
not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have forgotten
. . ."



HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905


The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James's
work.  His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility
proclaims the habit of frequent communion.  But not all his books.  There
is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been
provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting
forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of
finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these
victories have been won.  Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry
James's victories in England.

In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would
not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the
fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case
of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it not been, I
say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident
of--I suppose--the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from
its negative nature.  Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry
James's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of
surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own victorious
achievement in that field where he is a master.  Happily, he will never
be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment
of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom
such a confession naturally would be meant.  It is impossible to think of
Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality of
our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the sense of its logic
being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.

I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his
mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual
youth.  The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite
hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read.  To those who have the
grace to stay their feet it is manifest.  After some twenty years of
attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into
absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of
happiness into one's artistic existence.  If gratitude, as someone
defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to
be grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of his
works.  The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will
never run dry.  The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a
predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled
in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or
violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new
visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country
its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our
exploring.  It is, in fact, a magic spring.

With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped.  In its volume and force the body of
his work may be compared rather to a majestic river.  All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by
the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most
insignificant tides of reality.

Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be
compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of
wind swaying the action of a great multitude.  It is rescue work, this
snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out
of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be
seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in
this world of relative values--the permanence of memory.  And the
multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to
the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself!" meaning
really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable
consciousness.  But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of
this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our
industrious hands.

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship
fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain,
shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of
the sun.  The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain,
may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a
power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate
experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art.  I do
not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of
humanity by an ingenious tale.  It would be too much to expect--from
humanity.  I doubt the heroism of the hearers.  As to the heroism of the
artist, no doubt is necessary.  There would be on his part no heroism.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of
demonstration) because he must.  He is so much of a voice that, for him,
silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group
alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a
black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the
earth.  It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without
to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am
inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it
may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.  For mankind is
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity.  It
will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an
army having won a barren victory.  It will not know when it is beaten.
And perhaps it is right in that quality.  The victories are not, perhaps,
so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point
of view.  Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief.  Nobody has rendered
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe
of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren
strife.  And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry
James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only
personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in
the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms
and sound of trumpets.  Those are adventures in which only choice souls
are ever involved.  And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and
insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest, and the feelings
of the combatants.

The fiercest excitements of a romance _de cape et d'epee_, the romance of
yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action
(as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the
quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties
presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before all, of conduct--of
Mr. Henry James's men and women.  His mankind is delightful.  It is
delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will
sleep on the battlefield.  These warlike images come by themselves under
the pen; since from the duality of man's nature and the competition of
individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a
history of a really very relentless warfare.  Neither his fellows, nor
his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.  In virtue of these
allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his
fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations,
great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that
is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist
in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the
independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all
the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its
inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations.  That a sacrifice
must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in
the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by
the masters of fiction.  There is no other secret behind the curtain.  All
adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an
act of renunciation.  It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the
most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours
of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built
commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans.  Like
a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the
multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the
mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and
compromises which make up the sum of our activity.  But no man or woman
worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater.  And
Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits
his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities.
He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions.  The earth
itself has grown smaller in the course of ages.  But in every sphere of
human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one--not
counting here the greatness of the artist himself.  Wherever he stands,
at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to
his passions, or his passions to his gods.  That is the problem, great
enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and
knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr.
Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the
only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience.  I think that
the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable.
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.  But it is also more
than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of
forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based
on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand
impression.  Thus fiction is nearer truth.  But let that pass.  A
historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the
preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.  As is meet
for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian
of fine consciences.

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth will
be, or can be questioned.  Its fault is that it leaves so much out; and,
besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put into the
nutshell of a phrase.  The fact remains that he has made his choice, and
that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art.  He
has taken for himself the greater part.  The range of a fine conscience
covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be
called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice
discrimination of shades of conduct.  A fine conscience is more concerned
with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a
worldly sense.  There is, in short, more truth in its working for a
historian to detect and to show.  It is a thing of infinite complication
and suggestion.  None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James.  He
has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of
romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places.  There are no
secrets left within his range.  He has disclosed them as they should be
disclosed--that is, beautifully.  And, indeed, ugliness has but little
place in this world of his creation.  Yet, it is always felt in the
truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses
close upon it.  It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the
contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism
of their mistakes.  For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one.
What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the
intangible, ever-present, right.  It is most visible in their ultimate
triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of
renunciation.  Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous,
like that between substance and shadow.

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of
what is worth having, of what is worth holding.  The contrary opinion has
been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some
frequency.  To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual
moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly
renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women, stand out endowed with
extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection
offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those business-like
instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts.  And,
apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution
by rejection must always present a certain lack of finality, especially
startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards
and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden
death.  Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a
story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this
sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible.  But so it is;
and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire
for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the
longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth.  Perhaps the only true
desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be
set at rest.  One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels.  His
books end as an episode in life ends.  You remain with the sense of the
life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in
that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has
been read.  It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final.  Mr. Henry
James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the
impossible.



ALPHONSE DAUDET--1898


It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our past, our
indisputable possession.  One must admit regretfully that to-day is but a
scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious
yesterday that cannot be taken away from us.  A gift from the dead, great
and little, it makes life supportable, it almost makes one believe in a
benevolent scheme of creation.  And some kind of belief is very
necessary.  But the real knowledge of matters infinitely more profound
than any conceivable scheme of creation is with the dead alone.  That is
why our talk about them should be as decorous as their silence.  Their
generosity and their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and
they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to
claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates
about every twenty-five years--at the coming of every new and wiser
generation.

One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a prodigality
approaching magnificence, gave himself up to us without reserve in his
work, with all his qualities and all his faults.  Neither his qualities
nor his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible.  It
is only his generosity that is out of the common.  What strikes one most
in his work is the disinterestedness of the toiler.  With more talent
than many bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt
to persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness.  He never posed
as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his
interests to the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of
giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone of all things, in a
world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an
obvious meaning.  Neither did he affect a passive attitude before the
spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods--and in a rare mortal here
and there--may appear godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very
unwillingly, to think of the melancholy quietude of an ape.  He was not
the wearisome expounder of this or that theory, here to-day and spurned
to-morrow.  He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if
you like--but he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear, honest, and
vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; that regrettably
undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and pumpkins alike, and
cannot, of course, obtain the commendation of the very select who look at
life from under a parasol.

Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a rather outspoken belief
in himself, but his small distinction, worth many a greater, was in not
being in bondage to some vanishing creed.  He was a worker who could not
compel the admiration of the few, but who deserved the affection of the
many; and he may be spoken of with tenderness and regret, for he is not
immortal--he is only dead.  During his life the simple man whose business
it ought to have been to climb, in the name of Art, some elevation or
other, was content to remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations,
and take an eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys which are
tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous and
profound as some writers--probably for the sake of Art--would like to
make us believe.  There is, when one thinks of it, a considerable want of
candour in the august view of life.  Without doubt a cautious reticence
on the subject, or even a delicately false suggestion thrown out in that
direction is, in a way, praiseworthy, since it helps to uphold the
dignity of man--a matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still
one cannot help feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be
wholly blamable.  To state, then, with studied moderation a belief that
in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most of
us--the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love
and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its morality, or
its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it.  It may be
consoling--for human folly is very _bizarre_--but it is scarcely honest
to shout at those who struggle drowning in an insignificant pool: You are
indeed admirable and great to be the victims of such a profound, of such
a terrible ocean!

And Daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no better--but he was very
honest.  If he saw only the surface of things it is for the reason that
most things have nothing but a surface.  He did not pretend--perhaps
because he did not know how--he did not pretend to see any depths in a
life that is only a film of unsteady appearances stretched over regions
deep indeed, but which have nothing to do with the half-truths,
half-thoughts, and whole illusions of existence.  The road to these
distant regions does not lie through the domain of Art or the domain of
Science where well-known voices quarrel noisily in a misty emptiness; it
is a path of toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and unknown,
with closed lips, or, maybe, whispering their pain softly--only to
themselves.

But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a clear
felicity of tone--as a bird sings.  He saw life around him with extreme
clearness, and he felt it as it is--thinner than air and more elusive
than a flash of lightning.  He hastened to offer it his compassion, his
indignation, his wonder, his sympathy, without giving a moment of thought
to the momentous issues that are supposed to lurk in the logic of such
sentiments.  He tolerated the little foibles, the small ruffianisms, the
grave mistakes; the only thing he distinctly would not forgive was
hardness of heart.  This unpractical attitude would have been fatal to a
better man, but his readers have forgiven him.  Withal he is chivalrous
to exiled queens and deformed sempstresses, he is pityingly tender to
broken-down actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid Academicians; he is
glad of the joys of the commonplace people in a commonplace way--and he
never makes a secret of all this.  No, the man was not an artist.  What
if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his temperament so
vividly that they stand before us infinitely more real than the dingy
illusions surrounding our everyday existence?  The misguided man is for
ever pottering amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i's in the
wrong places.  He takes Tartarin by the arm, he does not conceal his
interest in the Nabob's cheques, his sympathy for an honest Academician
_plus bete que nature_, his hate for an architect _plus mauvais que la
gale_; he is in the thick of it all.  He feels with the Duc de Mora and
with Felicia Ruys--and he lets you see it.  He does not sit on a pedestal
in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose greatness
consists in being too stupid to care.  He cares immensely for his Nabobs,
his kings, his book-keepers, his Colettes, and his Saphos.  He vibrates
together with his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows M. de
Montpavon on that last walk along the Boulevards.

"Monsieur de Montpavon marche a la mort," and the creator of that unlucky
_gentilhomme_ follows with stealthy footsteps, with wide eyes, with an
impressively pointing finger.  And who wouldn't look?  But it is hard; it
is sometimes very hard to forgive him the dotted i's, the pointing
finger, this making plain of obvious mysteries.  "Monsieur de Montpavon
marche a la mort," and presently, on the crowded pavement, takes off his
hat with punctilious courtesy to the doctor's wife, who, elegant and
unhappy, is bound on the same pilgrimage.  This is too much!  We feel we
cannot forgive him such meetings, the constant whisper of his presence.
We feel we cannot, till suddenly the very _naivete_ of it all touches us
with the revealed suggestion of a truth.  Then we see that the man is not
false; all this is done in transparent good faith.  The man is not
melodramatic; he is only picturesque.  He may not be an artist, but he
comes as near the truth as some of the greatest.  His creations are seen;
you can look into their very eyes, and these are as thoughtless as the
eyes of any wise generation that has in its hands the fame of writers.
Yes, they are _seen_, and the man who is not an artist is seen also
commiserating, indignant, joyous, human and alive in their very midst.
Inevitably they _marchent a la mort_--and they are very near the truth of
our common destiny: their fate is poignant, it is intensely interesting,
and of not the slightest consequence.



GUY DE MAUPASSANT--1904 {1}


To introduce Maupassant to English readers with apologetic explanations
as though his art were recondite and the tendency of his work immoral
would be a gratuitous impertinence.

Maupassant's conception of his art is such as one would expect from a
practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simplicity of his
technique it ceases to be perceptible.  This is one of its greatest
qualities, and like all the great virtues it is based primarily on self-
denial.

To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a
difficult task.  One could not depend upon reason alone, nor yet trust
solely to one's emotions.  Used together, they would in many cases
traverse each other, because emotions have their own unanswerable logic.
Our capacity for emotion is limited, and the field of our intelligence is
restricted.  Responsiveness to every feeling, combined with the
penetration of every intellectual subterfuge, would end, not in judgment,
but in universal absolution.  _Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_.  And
in this benevolent neutrality towards the warring errors of human nature
all light would go out from art and from life.

We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant's attitude towards our
world in which, like the rest of us, he has that share which his senses
are able to give him.  But we need not quarrel with him violently.  If
our feelings (which are tender) happen to be hurt because his talent is
not exercised for the praise and consolation of mankind, our intelligence
(which is great) should let us see that he is a very splendid sinner,
like all those who in this valley of compromises err by over-devotion to
the truth that is in them.  His determinism, barren of praise, blame and
consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art.  The worth of
every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is
held.

Except for his philosophy, which in the case of so consummate an artist
does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind), Maupassant of all
writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers.  He does
not require forgiveness because he is never dull.

The interest of a reader in a work of imagination is either ethical or
that of simple curiosity.  Both are perfectly legitimate, since there is
both a moral and an excitement to be found in a faithful rendering of
life.  And in Maupassant's work there is the interest of curiosity and
the moral of a point of view consistently preserved and never obtruded
for the end of personal gratification.  The spectacle of this immense
talent served by exceptional faculties and triumphing over the most
thankless subjects by an unswerving singleness of purpose is in itself an
admirable lesson in the power of artistic honesty, one may say of
artistic virtue.  The inherent greatness of the man consists in this,
that he will let none of the fascinations that beset a writer working in
loneliness turn him away from the straight path, from the vouchsafed
vision of excellence.  He will not be led into perdition by the
seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that
splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity
on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering cortege of deadly sins
before the austere anchorite in the desert air of Thebaide.  This is not
to say that Maupassant's austerity has never faltered; but the fact
remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in hurling him down
from his high, if narrow, pedestal.

It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question.  Let
the discriminating reader, who at times may well spare a moment or two to
the consideration and enjoyment of artistic excellence, be asked to
reflect a little upon the texture of two stories included in this volume:
"A Piece of String," and "A Sale."  How many openings the last offers for
the gratuitous display of the author's wit or clever buffoonery, the
first for an unmeasured display of sentiment!  And both sentiment and
buffoonery could have been made very good too, in a way accessible to the
meanest intelligence, at the cost of truth and honesty.  Here it is where
Maupassant's austerity comes in.  He refrains from setting his cleverness
against the eloquence of the facts.  There is humour and pathos in these
stories; but such is the greatness of his talent, the refinement of his
artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear inherent in the
very things of which he speaks, as if they had been altogether
independent of his presentation.  Facts, and again facts are his unique
concern.  That is why he is not always properly understood.  His facts
are so perfectly rendered that, like the actualities of life itself, they
demand from the reader the faculty of observation which is rare, the
power of appreciation which is generally wanting in most of us who are
guided mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from us no
qualities except a vague susceptibility to emotion.  Nobody has ever
gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of
vital facts.  Words alone strung upon a convention have fascinated us as
worthless glass beads strung on a thread have charmed at all times our
brothers the unsophisticated savages of the islands.  Now, Maupassant, of
whom it has been said that he is the master of the _mot juste_, has never
been a dealer in words.  His wares have been, not glass beads, but
polished gems; not the most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very
first water of their kind.

That he took trouble with his gems, taking them up in the rough and
polishing each facet patiently, the publication of the two posthumous
volumes of short stories proves abundantly.  I think it proves also the
assertion made here that he was by no means a dealer in words.  On
looking at the first feeble drafts from which so many perfect stories
have been fashioned, one discovers that what has been matured, improved,
brought to perfection by unwearied endeavour is not the diction of the
tale, but the vision of its true shape and detail.  Those first attempts
are not faltering or uncertain in expression.  It is the conception which
is at fault.  The subjects have not yet been adequately seen.  His
proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around
misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging
neither to earth nor to heaven.  His vision by a more scrupulous,
prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world
discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him
upon the face of things and events.  This was the particular shape taken
by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the light of his
day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation.  His realities came
to him from a genuine source, from this universe of vain appearances
wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted,
and humble.

Maupassant's renown is universal, but his popularity is restricted.  It
is not difficult to perceive why.  Maupassant is an intensely national
writer.  He is so intensely national in his logic, in his clearness, in
his aesthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been accepted by his
countrymen without having had to pay the tribute of flattery either to
the nation as a whole, or to any class, sphere or division of the nation.
The truth of his art tells with an irresistible force; and he stands
excused from the duty of patriotic posturing.  He is a Frenchman of
Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to
be universally comprehensible.  What is wanting to his universal success
is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness.  He neglects to
qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew
paper roses over the tombs.  The disregard of these common decencies lays
him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, hardness.  And yet it can
be safely affirmed that this man wrote from the fulness of a
compassionate heart.  He is merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; he
does not rail at their prudent fears and their small artifices; he does
not despise their labours.  It seems to me that he looks with an eye of
profound pity upon their troubles, deceptions and misery.  But he looks
at them all.  He sees--and does not turn away his head.  As a matter of
fact he is courageous.

Courage and justice are not popular virtues.  The practice of strict
justice is shocking to the multitude who always (perhaps from an obscure
sense of guilt) attach to it the meaning of mercy.  In the majority of
us, who want to be left alone with our illusions, courage inspires a
vague alarm.  This is what is felt about Maupassant.  His qualities, to
use the charming and popular phrase, are not lovable.  Courage being a
force will not masquerade in the robes of affected delicacy and
restraint.  But if his courage is not of a chivalrous stamp, it cannot be
denied that it is never brutal for the sake of effect.  The writer of
these few reflections, inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with
the work of the man, has been struck by the appreciation of Maupassant
manifested by many women gifted with tenderness and intelligence.  Their
more delicate and audacious souls are good judges of courage.  Their
finer penetration has discovered his genuine masculinity without display,
his virility without a pose.  They have discerned in his faithful
dealings with the world that enterprising and fearless temperament, poor
in ideas but rich in power, which appeals most to the feminine mind.

It cannot be denied that he thinks very little.  In him extreme energy of
perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of
force and desire.  His view of intellectual problems is perhaps more
simple than their nature warrants; still a man who has written _Yvette_
cannot be accused of want of subtlety.  But one cannot insist enough upon
this, that his subtlety, his humour, his grimness, though no doubt they
are his own, are never presented otherwise but as belonging to our life,
as found in nature, whose beauties and cruelties alike breathe the spirit
of serene unconsciousness.

Maupassant's philosophy of life is more temperamental than rational.  He
expects nothing from gods or men.  He trusts his senses for information
and his instinct for deductions.  It may seem that he has made but little
use of his mind.  But let me be clearly understood.  His sensibility is
really very great; and it is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks
vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible premises
to an unsophisticated conclusion.

This is literary honesty.  It may be remarked that it does not differ
very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable majority, from the
honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all
those who express their fundamental sentiment in the ordinary course of
their activities, by the work of their hands.

The work of Maupassant's hands is honest.  He thinks sufficiently to
concrete his fearless conclusions in illuminative instances.  He renders
them with that exact knowledge of the means and that absolute devotion to
the aim of creating a true effect--which is art.  He is the most
accomplished of narrators.

It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit
than those writers who make haste to submerge the difficulties of our
holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental
assumptions.  Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth.  He
says himself in one of his descriptive passages: "Nous autres que seduit
la terre . . ."  It was true.  The earth had for him a compelling charm.
He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of
real passion.  His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality
that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the
ever-shifting surface of life.  To say that he could not embrace in his
glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that he was
human.  He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made
his own.  This creative artist has the true imagination; he never
condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretences.  And he
stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to the miserable vanity
of a catching phrase.



ANATOLE FRANCE--1904


I.--"CRAINQUEBILLE"


The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration of
its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives.  The story of
Crainquebille's encounter with human justice stands at the head of them;
a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of
playful irony characteristic of the writer on whom the most distinguished
amongst his literary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince of
Prose.

Never has a dignity been better borne.  M. Anatole France is a good
prince.  He knows nothing of tyranny but much of compassion.  The
detachment of his mind from common errors and current superstitions
befits the exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of Literature.  It
is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in the forum had little
to do with his elevation.  Their elect are of another stamp.  They are
such as their need of precipitate action requires.  He is the Elect of
the Senate--the Senate of Letters--whose Conscript Fathers have
recognised him as _primus inter pares_; a post of pure honour and of no
privilege.

It is a good choice.  First, because it is just, and next, because it is
safe.  The dignity will suffer no diminution in M. Anatole France's
hands.  He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the
past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a
good prince should be in his public action.  It is a Republican dignity.
And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical insight into an forms of
government, is a good Republican.  He is indulgent to the weaknesses of
the people, and perceives that political institutions, whether contrived
by the wisdom of the few or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of
securing the happiness of mankind.  He perceives this truth in the
serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind.  He expresses his
convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed
princely qualities.  He is a great analyst of illusions.  He searches and
probes their innermost recesses as if they were realities made of an
eternal substance.  And therein consists his humanity; this is the
expression of his profound and unalterable compassion.  He will flatter
no tribe no section in the forum or in the market-place.  His lucid
thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of
affection.  He feels that men born in ignorance as in the house of an
enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless
centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever
deferred.  He knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the
almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege,
to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat
their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can
conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their
irremediable littleness.  He knows this well because he is an artist and
a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort there
is a refuge from despair for minds less clear-seeing and philosophic than
his own.  Therefore he wishes us to believe and to hope, preserving in
our activity the consoling illusion of power and intelligent purpose.  He
is a good and politic prince.

"The majesty of justice is contained entire in each sentence pronounced
by the judge in the name of the sovereign people.  Jerome Crainquebille,
hawker of vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the law as he
stood indicted before the tribunal of the higher Police Court on a charge
of insulting a constable of the force."  With this exposition begins the
first tale of M. Anatole France's latest volume.

The bust of the Republic and the image of the Crucified Christ appear
side by side above the bench occupied by the President Bourriche and his
two Assessors; all the laws divine and human are suspended over the head
of Crainquebille.

From the first visual impression of the accused and of the court the
author passes by a characteristic and natural turn to the historical and
moral significance of those two emblems of State and Religion whose
accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man.  But
the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never confused.  His reasoning is
clear and informed by a profound erudition.  Such is not the case of
Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted
power of society in the person of a policeman.  The charge is not true,
nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his
position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the
memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian
peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice.  He might
well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if
it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprisonment, in the name
of the Crucified Redeemer.

He might have done so.  But Crainquebille, who has lived pushing every
day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the
streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind.  Truth to say he has
nothing.  He is one of the disinherited.  Properly speaking, he has no
existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till
M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him
up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the
book has it, no doubt for our profit also.

Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical,
political or social considerations which can be brought to bear upon his
case.  He remains lost in astonishment.  Penetrated with respect,
overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of
his transgression.  In his conscience he does not think himself culpable;
but M. Anatole France's philosophical mind discovers for us that he feels
all the insignificance of such a thing as the conscience of a mere street-
hawker in the face of the symbols of the law and before the ministers of
social repression.  Crainquebille is innocent; but already the young
advocate, his defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt.

On this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the story
which, as the author's dedication states, has inspired an admirable
draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of
tragic grandeur.  And this opening chapter without a name--consisting of
two and a half pages, some four hundred words at most--is a masterpiece
of insight and simplicity, resumed in M. Anatole France's distinction of
thought and in his princely command of words.

It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, delicate and
complete like the petals of a flower, presenting to us the Adventure of
Crainquebille--Crainquebille before the justice--An Apology for the
President of the Tribunal--Of the Submission of Crainquebille to the Laws
of the Republic--Of his Attitude before the Public Opinion, and so on to
the chapter of the Last Consequences.  We see, created for us in his
outward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high
estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this
time, the majesty of the social order in the person of another police-
constable.  It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge.
Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise
the black standard of insurrection.  He is cold and homeless and
starving.  He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison.  He
perceives the means to get back there.  Since he has been locked up, he
argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a matter of fact he did
not say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he meets will
say those very words in order to be imprisoned again.  Thus reasons
Crainquebille with simplicity and confidence.  He accepts facts.  Nothing
surprises him.  But all the phenomena of social organisation and of his
own life remain for him mysterious to the end.  The description of the
policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the
light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet
of a rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted
thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision.  From under
the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who has just
uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the
popular slang--_Mort aux vaches_!  They look upon him shining in the deep
shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and
contempt.

He does not move.  Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice,
repeats once more the insulting words.  But this policeman is full of
philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence.  He refuses to take in
charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and
ragged in the drizzle.  And the ruined Crainquebille, victim of a
ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes
on hopelessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each
in a ruddy halo of falling mist.

M. Anatole France can speak for the people.  This prince of the Senate is
invested with the tribunitian power.  M. Anatole France is something of a
Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical
philosophy.  But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince
too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked
in one of his public speeches: "We are all Socialists now."  And in the
sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that
is true enough.  To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion.  An
emotion is much and is also less than nothing.  It is the initial
impulse.  The real Socialism of to-day is a religion.  It has its dogmas.
The value of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and M.
Anatole France, who loves truth, does not love dogma.  Only, unlike
religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas but
in its ideal.  It is perhaps a too materialistic ideal, and the mind of
M. Anatole France may not find in it either comfort or consolation.  It
is not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is
something reposeful in the finality of popular conceptions.  M. Anatole
France, a good prince and a good Republican, will succeed no doubt in
being a good Socialist.  He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and
the unlovely form of the ideal.  His art will find its own beauty in the
imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call
aloud for redress.  M. Anatole France is humane.  He is also human.  He
may be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the evils are many
and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea, that
fatality is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of death in
the triumph of the humanitarian idea.  He may forget all that because
love is stronger than truth.

Besides "Crainquebille" this volume contains sixteen other stories and
sketches.  To define them it is enough to say that they are written in M.
Anatole France's prose.  One sketch entitled "Riquet" may be found
incorporated in the volume of _Monsieur Bergeret a Paris_.  "Putois" is a
remarkable little tale, significant, humorous, amusing, and symbolic.  It
concerns the career of a man born in the utterance of a hasty and
untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to decline without offence
a very pressing invitation to dinner from a very tyrannical aunt.  This
happens in a provincial town, and the lady says in effect: "Impossible,
my dear aunt.  To-morrow I am expecting the gardener."  And the garden
she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is
insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy.  "A gardener!  What
for?" asks the aunt.  "To work in the garden."  And the poor lady is
abashed at the transparence of her evasion.  But the lie is told, it is
believed, and she sticks to it.  When the masterful old aunt inquires,
"What is the man's name, my dear?" she answers brazenly, "His name is
Putois."  "Where does he live?"  "Oh, I don't know; anywhere.  He won't
give his address.  One leaves a message for him here and there."  "Oh!  I
see," says the other; "he is a sort of ne'er do well, an idler, a
vagabond.  I advise you, my dear, to be careful how you let such a
creature into your grounds; but I have a large garden, and when you do
not want his services I shall find him some work to do, and see he does
it too.  Tell your Putois to come and see me."  And thereupon Putois is
born; he stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and
crime, stealing melons from gardens and tea-spoons from pantries,
indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming the talk of the town and
of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far-distant places; pursued by
gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy householders that he "knows
that scamp very well, and won't be long in laying his hands upon him."  A
detailed description of his person collected from the information
furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper.
Putois lives in his strength and malevolence.  He lives after the manner
of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olympus.  He is the creation of the
popular mind.  There comes a time when even the innocent originator of
that mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment
that he may have a real and tangible presence.  All this is told with the
wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M. Anatole
France's readers and admirers.  For it is difficult to read M. Anatole
France without admiring him.  He has the princely gift of arousing a
spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our
reason has its place by the side of our enthusiasm.  He is an artist.  As
an artist he awakens emotion.  The quality of his art remains, as an
inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his
thought compel our intellectual admiration.

In this volume the trifle called "The Military Manoeuvres at Montil,"
apart from its far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit
of automobilism.  Somehow or other, how you cannot tell, the flight over
the country in a motor-car, its sensations, its fatigue, its vast
topographical range, its incidents down to the bursting of a tyre, are
brought home to you with all the force of high imaginative perception.  It
would be out of place to analyse here the means by which the true
impression is conveyed so that the absurd rushing about of General
Decuir, in a 30-horse-power car, in search of his cavalry brigade,
becomes to you a more real experience than any day-and-night run you may
ever have taken yourself.  Suffice it to say that M. Anatole France had
thought the thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art,
a distinct achievement.  And there are other sketches in this book, more
or less slight, but all worthy of regard--the childhood's recollections
of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoe; the dialogue of the two upright
judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean
Marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one
ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike.  The vision of M. Anatole
France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm,
indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures
of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians.  Contemplating
the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom
of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the
futility of literary watchwords and the vanity of all the schools of
fiction.  Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius.
He is not that.  Issued legitimately from the past, he is mindful of his
high descent.  He has a critical temperament joined to creative power.  He
surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows
nothing of excesses but much of restraint.


II.--"L'ILE DES PINGOUINS"


M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable
histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators and of officials of
the Third Republic, of _grandes dames_ and of dames not so very grand, of
ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and
generals--in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his
penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism,
and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice,
contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony.  As to M. Anatole
France's adventures, these are well-known.  They lie open to this
prodigal world in the four volumes of the _Vie Litteraire_, describing
the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces.  For such is the
romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic.
History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the
magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no material
limits can stand in the way of a genius.  The latest book from his
pen--which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once
upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful--this latest book is,
up to a certain point, a book of travel.

I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court.  The book is not a
record of globe-trotting.  I regret it.  It would have been a joy to
watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his
Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most
humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel.  He would have
attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of
compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory
illusion.  M. Anatole France is a great magician, yet there seem to be
tasks which he dare not face.  For he is also a sage.

It is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin
of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the Atlantic.  It is a book of exploration
and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and
a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century.  It is nothing
so recent as that.  It dates much further back; long, long before the
dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German
Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-
tables.  The best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise
I can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship.  It was a
trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.

The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica.  I had never heard of him
before, but I believe now in his arduous existence with a faith which is
a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness and delicate irony.
St. Mael existed.  It is distinctly stated of him that his life was a
progress in virtue.  Thus it seems that there may be saints that are not
progressively virtuous.  St. Mael was not of that kind.  He was
industrious.  He evangelised the heathen.  He erected two hundred and
eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys.  Indefatigable navigator of the
faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast
to coast and from island to island along the northern seas.  At the age
of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his
sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost
nothing of its force.

A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out
his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter
progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the
simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive
enemy of mankind.

The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at once
that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances of human
ingenuity.  His punishment was adequate.  A terrific tempest snatched the
rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed St.
Mael was stranded violently on the Island of Penguins.

The saint wandered away from the shore.  It was a flat, round island
whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with clouds.  The
rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain which caused the simple
saint to exclaim in great delight: "This is the island of tears, the
island of contrition!"

Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an
amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered
deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly,
erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd.  At once he began to
preach to them the doctrine of salvation.  Having finished his discourse
he lost no time in administering to his interesting congregation the
sacrament of baptism.

If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure
to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint.  Pray reflect on the
magnitude of the issues!  It is easy to believe what M. Anatole France
says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins became known in Paradise, it
caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation.

M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself.  He reports with great
casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in
Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of
religious mysteries.  Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned
into human beings; and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these
innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the
miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen
condition of humanity.

At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian.  From being the
Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the
Gibbon of Imperial Penguins.  Tracing the development of their
civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly
and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens
by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted
to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins.  It is a very admirable
treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the
feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a
shelf.



TURGENEV {2}--1917


Dear Edward,

I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that
fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for
himself, with the exception of bare justice.  Perhaps that will come to
him, too, in time.  Your study may help the consummation.  For his luck
persists after his death.  What greater luck an artist like Turgenev
could wish for than to find in the English-speaking world a translator
who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his
work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high
qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.

After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship
too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of
your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes
of Turgenev's complete edition, the last of which came into the light of
public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.

With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev
had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of
the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in
the Preface to _Smoke_ "to all time."

Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years.  Since it came to
an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an
accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and
intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his
work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer.  The first
stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in
every page of the novels, of the short stories and of _A Sportsman's
Sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures.

Those will never grow old.  Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth
of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the
variety of its disclosures.  Whether Turgenev's art, which has captured
it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all time" it is hard to
say.  Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and
characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least
till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity
of perfected Eugenics.  But even by then, I think, women would not have
changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly,
so reverently and so passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all
time.

Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art.  They are Russian of
course.  Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national.
But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which
the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the
great light and the free air of the world.  Had he invented them all and
also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move,
his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their
perplexed lives.  They are his own and also universal.  Any one can
accept them with no more question than one accepts the Italians of
Shakespeare.

In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic
and welcome to the English-speaking world, is his essential humanity.  All
his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are
human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking
themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.
They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit
to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from
day to day the ever-receding future.

I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense.  But one ends by
having some doubts.  To be so great without the slightest parade and so
fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's
influence with his contemporaries.

Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things Russian.
It wouldn't be true.  I know nothing of them.  But I am aware of a few
general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the
loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of
his conscience--no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the
greater part of his existence.  From what one knows of his history it
appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat
Turgenev with in his latter years.  When he died the characteristically
chicken-hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the
tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for
a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that
impartial lover of _all_ his countrymen had suffered so much in his
lifetime.  For he, too, was sensitive.  Every page of his writing bears
its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.

And now he suffers a little from other things.  In truth it is not the
convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under
a curse.  For only think!  Every gift has been heaped on his cradle:
absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the
quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of
judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring
instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and
women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy--and
all that in perfect measure.  There's enough there to ruin the prospects
of any writer.  For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had
Antinous himself in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in
protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one
per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double-
headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse
collar.

J. C.



STEPHEN CRANE--A NOTE WITHOUT DATES--1919


My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. Pawling,
partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.

One day Mr. Pawling said to me: "Stephen Crane has arrived in England.  I
asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two
names.  One of them was yours."  I had then just been reading, like the
rest of the world, Crane's _Red Badge of Courage_.  The subject of that
story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's
emotions.  That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was
interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that
little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition I
had been even more interested in the personality of the writer.  The
picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his
country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an
earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative
force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether
worthy of admiration.

Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the
reading of the _Nigger of the Narcissus_, a book of mine which had also
been published lately.  I was truly pleased to hear this.

On my next visit to town we met at a lunch.  I saw a young man of medium
stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the
eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some
purpose.

He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things
of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that
seemed to reach, within life's appearances and forms, the very spirit of
life's truth.  His ignorance of the world at large--he had seen very
little of it--did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts,
events, and picturesque men.

His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting,
and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly
Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect.  But not on me.  Whatever he
said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic
simplicity which was extremely engaging.  He knew little of literature,
either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful
artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand.  Then his gift came
out--and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language.
His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface.  In his
writing he was very sure of his effects.  I don't think he was ever in
doubt about what he could do.  Yet it often seemed to me that he was but
half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.

This achievement was curtailed by his early death.  It was a great loss
to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature.  I think that he
had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write.
Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of
the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible
revelation.  As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by
quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set
before us in the terms of his own artistic vision?  Perhaps he did not
lose a great deal.  The recognition he was accorded was rather languid
and given him grudgingly.  The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales
in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the _New Review_ and later,
towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his
magazine.  For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he
had the misfortune to be, as the French say, _mal entoure_.  He was beset
by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were
antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature.  Some of them have
died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now.  I
don't think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a
strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which
prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and
patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret
irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes.  My
wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the
Park at Brede.  Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a
born horseman.  He never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on
the back of a horse.  He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy
to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented
him with his first dog.

I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London.  I saw him
for the last time on his last day in England.  It was in Dover, in a big
hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea.  He had
been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but
one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most
forlorn of all hopes.  The last words he breathed out to me were: "I am
tired.  Give my love to your wife and child."  When I stopped at the door
for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was
staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that
glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.

Those who have read his little tale, "Horses," and the story, "The Open
Boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he
loved horses and the sea.  And his passage on this earth was like that of
a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and
without sunshine.



TALES OF THE SEA--1898


It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the
character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that Marryat is
largely human.  He is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary
artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own
temperament.  To his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and
warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage.  His novels are
not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that
make up his record of naval service.  To the artist his work is
interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic
nature.  It is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit
animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young.  There
is an air of fable about it.  Its loss would be irreparable, like the
curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical document.  It
is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.

To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element.  It was a stage,
where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as
the world had never seen before.  The greatness of that achievement
cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the
destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the
remoteness of an ideal.  History preserves the skeleton of facts and,
here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marryat's novels that we
find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we
obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit
animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their
country such a shining monument of memories.

Marryat is really a writer of the Service.  What sets him apart is his
fidelity.  His pen serves his country as well as did his professional
skill and his renowned courage.  His figures move about between water and
sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the
Service.  His novels, like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and
frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably.  The loves and the
hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices.  His
women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant
Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like the
shadows of what has never been.  His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens,
his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of somewhere, many times,
without ever believing in their existence.  His morality is honourable
and conventional.  There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in
the midst of carnage.  His naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light.
There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with
memorable eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in
the drawing.  They do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to the
Service.  And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their
time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an
unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years
of war and victories can give.  His adventures are enthralling; the
rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his
sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious.  His greatness
is undeniable.

It is undeniable.  To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is
Marryat's navy still.  He has created a priceless legend.  If he be not
immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because
he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that
Service on which the life of his country depends.  The tradition of the
great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the
guarantee of the future.  He loved his country first, the Service next,
the sea perhaps not at all.  But the sea loved him without reserve.  It
gave him his professional distinction and his author's fame--a fame such
as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of
the sea with true artistic instinct.  He is not invincibly young and
heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of
adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage.  For
James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential
part of existence.  He could hear its voice, he could understand its
silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that
felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception
alone.  His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his
contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea.  But he
loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding.  In his sea
tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor
in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in
touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its
immense solitudes.  His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a
gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon.  They embrace the colours
of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the
great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the
alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise
and the menace of the sea.

He knows the men and he knows the sea.  His method may be often faulty,
but his art is genuine.  The truth is within him.  The road to legitimate
realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that--only it is
expressed in the leisurely manner of his time.  He has the knowledge of
simple hearts.  Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the
individuality of life and the significance of a type.  It is hard to
believe that Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head,
Captain Tuck of the packet-ship _Montauk_, or Daggett, the tenacious
commander of the _Sea Lion_ of Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day
and be utterly forgotten.  His sympathy is large, and his humour is as
genuine--and as perfectly unaffected--as is his art.  In certain passages
he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.

He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as
well as any novelist of his time.  If he pitches upon episodes redounding
to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to
forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her
expense.  The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and
there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old
country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced
by a less definite sentiment.

Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so
many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career.  Through
the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped
also the life of the writer of this appreciation.  Life is life, and art
is art--and truth is hard to find in either.  Yet in testimony to the
achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the
writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one
and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other--to which he
had surrendered--have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of
laborious years.  He has never regretted his surrender.



AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}--1898


In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the sketch
entitled "At the Heels of the White Man," expresses his anxiety as to the
state of England's account in the Day-Book of the Recording Angel "for
the good and the bad we have done--both with the most excellent
intentions."  The intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though,
of course, every nation's conquests are paved with good intentions; or it
may be that the Recording Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of
hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a
struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth--in
victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation.

And, also, love will count for much.  If the opinion of a looker-on from
afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford's anxiety about his country's
record is needless.  To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides
he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of
his race.  And of all the nations conquering distant territories in the
name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who,
with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh
Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as "the land which is very
dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent"--and where
(I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect
and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.

All these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all on the
same level.  The descriptive chapters, results of personal observation,
seem to me the most interesting.  And, indeed, in a book of this kind it
is the author's personality which awakens the greatest interest; it
shapes itself before one in the ring of sentences, it is seen between the
lines--like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced
by the sound of the _parang_ chopping the swaying creepers, while the man
himself is glimpsed, now and then, indistinct and passing between the
trees.  Thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through
the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating companion in a land of
fascination.

It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. Hugh Clifford is
most convincing.  He looks upon them lovingly, for the land is "very dear
to him," and he records his cherished impressions so that the forest, the
great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in
the memory of the reader long after the book is closed.  He does not say
anything, in so many words, of his affection for those who live amid the
scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon
us if we suspect him of such a rare weakness.  In his preface he
expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of
the kailyard school, or--looking up to a very different plane--the genius
of Mr. Barrie.  He has, however, gifts of his own, and his genius has
served his country and his fortunes in another direction.  Yet it is when
attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in telling us the
simple story of Umat, the punkah-puller, with unaffected simplicity and
half-concealed tenderness, that he comes nearest to artistic achievement.

Each study in this volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told
without artifice, but with an elective sureness of knowledge.  The story
of Tukang Burok's love, related in the old man's own words, conveys the
very breath of Malay thought and speech.  In "His Little Bill," the
coolie, Lim Teng Wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us,
an insignificant and tragic victim of fate with whom he had quarrelled to
the death over a matter of seven dollars and sixty-eight cents.  The
story of "The Schooner with a Past" may be heard, from the Straits
eastward, with many variations.  Out in the Pacific the schooner becomes
a cutter, and the pearl-divers are replaced by the Black-birds of the
Labour Trade.  But Mr. Hugh Clifford's variation is very good.  There is
a passage in it--a trifle--just the diver as seen coming up from the
depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct artistic value.
And, scattered through the book, there are many other passages of almost
equal descriptive excellence.

Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a
fundamental error in appreciation.  Like faith, enthusiasm, or heroism,
art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more
splendid, inspiring, or sinister.  And this book is only truth,
interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward.  The
Resident of Pahang has the devoted friendship of Umat, the punkah-puller,
he has an individual faculty of vision, a large sympathy, and the
scrupulous consciousness of the good and evil in his hands.  He may as
well rest content with such gifts.  One cannot expect to be, at the same
time, a ruler of men and an irreproachable player on the flute.



A HAPPY WANDERER--1910


Converts are interesting people.  Most of us, if you will pardon me for
betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other, discovered
in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road.
And what did we do in our pride and our cowardice?  Casting fearful
glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery
discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track
we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more
clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.

The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular
sense), is not discreet.  His pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly
off the track--the touch of grace is mostly sudden--and facing about in a
new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on
Death itself.

Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite
indiscretion.  The most illustrious example of a convert, that Flower of
chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only
genuine immortal hidalgo.  The delectable Knight of Spain became
converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an
imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission.  Forthwith he was
beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the
Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social
order.  I do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr.
Luffmann in a wooden cage. {4}  I do not raise the point because I wish
him any harm.  Quite the contrary.  I am a humane person.  Let him take
it as the highest praise--but I must say that he richly deserves that
sort of attention.

On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of
the exalted association.  The grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the
serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to
noble visions are not his.  Mr. Luffmann has no mission.  He is no Knight
sublimely Errant.  But he is an excellent Vagabond.  He is full of merit.
That peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr.
Roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick.  The truth
is that the ex-autocrat of all the States does not like rebels against
the sullen order of our universe.  Make the best of it or perish--he
cries.  A sane lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a
sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another great
Governor), that distinguished litterateur has no mercy for dreamers.  And
our author happens to be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some
rather fine reveries.

Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how any
mercy can possibly be extended to Mr. Luffmann.  He is a convert from the
creed of strenuous life.  For this renegade the body is of little
account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of
the inner life; while he was young he did grind virtuously at the sacred
handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people
because he believes no longer in toil without end.  Certain respectable
folk hate him--so he says--because he dares to think that "poetry,
beauty, and the broad face of the world are the best things to be in love
with."  He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is "the land
of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind."  The universal
striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly.  Didn't I tell you
he was a fit subject for the cage?

It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that this
desperate character is not altogether an outcast.  Little girls seem to
like him.  One of them, after listening to some of his tales, remarked to
her mother, "Wouldn't it be lovely if what he says were true!"  Here you
have Woman!  The charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor
swallow a gnat.  Not publicly.  These operations, without which the world
they have such a large share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left
to us--men.  And then we are chided for being coarse.  This is a refined
objection but does not seem fair.  Another little girl--or perhaps the
same little girl--wrote to him in Cordova, "I hope Poste-Restante is a
nice place, and that you are very comfortable."  Woman again!  I have in
my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true and
lovely.  Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms.  And why?
Simply because I am not enough of a Vagabond.  The dear despots of the
fireside have a weakness for lawless characters.  This is amiable, but
does not seem rational.

Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impressionist.  He is far too earnest
in his heart, and not half sufficiently precise in his style to be that.
But he is an excellent narrator.  More than any Vagabond I have ever met,
he knows what he is about.  There is not one of his quiet days which is
dull.  You will find in them a love-story not made up, the
_coup-de-foudre_, the lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will
marvel how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same time so
tragically delicate.  You will find there landladies devoured with
jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy
shopkeepers, all the _cosas de Espana_--and, in addition, the pale girl
Rosario.  I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your
benevolent compassion.  You will find in his pages the humours of
starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an
exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of
attention.  And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no
visionary.  He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on
real human affairs.  I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with
bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds
to prayer in the holy places of the earth.

But I like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like!  His quiet days
require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to
take their ease in.  For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven--or is it
nine?--crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a
wretchedly straitened space.  A most unconventional thing is his notion
of quietness.  One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the
author of _Quiet Days in Spain_ all days may seem quiet, because, a
courageous convert, he is now at peace with himself.

How better can we take leave of this interesting Vagabond than with the
road salutation of passing wayfarers: "And on you be peace! . . . You
have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice.  There's nothing like
giving up one's life to an unselfish passion.  Let the rich and the
powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable progress.
The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its
illusions.  No great passion can be barren.  May a world of gracious and
poignant images attend the lofty solitude of your renunciation!"



THE LIFE BEYOND--1910


You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical
effect on one--mostly an audible effect.  I am not alluding here to Blue
books or to books of statistics.  The effect of these is simply
exasperating and no more.  No! the books I have in mind are just the
common books of commerce you and I read when we have five minutes to
spare, the usual hired books published by ordinary publishers, printed by
ordinary printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) by the
usual circulating libraries, the guardians of our firesides, whose names
are household words within the four seas.

To see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering
themselves with unbounded trust to the direction of the circulating
libraries is very touching.  It is even, in a sense, a beautiful
spectacle, because, as you know, humility is a rare and fragrant virtue;
and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals and your
intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen?  I suppose that there
are some very perfect people who allow the Army and Navy Stores to censor
their diet.  So much merit, however, I imagine, is not frequently met
with here below.  The flesh, alas! is weak, and--from a certain point of
view--so important!

A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question:
What would become of us if the circulating libraries ceased to exist?  It
is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and
face the truth.  On this earth of ours nothing lasts.  _Tout passe, tout
casse, tout lasse_.  Imagine the utter wreck overtaking the morals of our
beautiful country-houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die!
But pray do not shudder.  There is no occasion.

Their spirit shall survive.  I declare this from inward conviction, and
also from scientific information received lately.  For observe: the
circulating libraries are human institutions.  I beg you to follow me
closely.  They are human institutions, and being human, they are not
animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual.  Thus, any man with enough
money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall
be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating
libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him.

For, and this is the information alluded to above, Science, having in its
infinite wanderings run up against various wonders and mysteries, is
apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I
conclude, to all his works as well.

I do not know exactly what this "Science" may be; and I do not think that
anybody else knows; but that is the information stated shortly.  It is
contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5}  I know it is
not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel.
The author, on his side, warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is
not metaphysics, that it is not natural science.  After this
comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will
admit, a pretty hard nut to crack.

But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the
physical effect of some common, hired books.  A few of them (not
necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for
you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the
tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once.
But there is infinite variety in the noises books do make.  I have now on
my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I
have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw.  I
am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about,
for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced
to give it up ere the end of the page is reached.

The book, however, which I have found so difficult to define, is by no
means noisy.  As a mere piece of writing it may be described as being
breathless itself and taking the reader's breath away, not by the
magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the
delivery.  The constantly elusive argument and the illustrative
quotations go on without a single reflective pause.  For this reason
alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process.

The author himself (I use his own words) "suspects" that what he has
written "may be theology after all."  It may be.  It is not my place
either to allay or to confirm the author's suspicion of his own work.  But
I will state its main thesis: "That science regarded in the gross
dictates the spirituality of man and strongly implies a spiritual destiny
for individual human beings."  This means: Existence after Death--that
is, Immortality.

To find out its value you must go to the book.  But I will observe here
that an Immortality liable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by
the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely
worth having.  Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality
at the beck and call of Eusapia Palladino?  That woman lives on the top
floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead,
flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have
loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer, and die--she gets them
to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a
curtain.  This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one's
faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one
would long to do.

And to believe that these manifestations, which the author evidently
takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith; to believe that
the new psychology has, only the other day, discovered man to be a
"spiritual mystery," is really carrying humility towards that universal
provider, Science, too far.

* * * * *

We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of
absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself.  It is not for
nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the
altar, murmurs, "Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble
me?"  Since the day of Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy,
are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world.  What humanity needs
is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in
this life and infinite mercy on the Day of Judgment.

And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may
well be content to repeat the Invocation of Sar Peladan.  Sar Peladan was
an occultist, a seer, a modern magician.  He believed in astrology, in
the spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously and deliciously
absurd.  Incidentally he wrote some incomprehensible poems and a few
pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, "a magician is nothing
else but a great harmonist."  Here are some eight lines of the
magnificent Invocation.  Let me, however, warn you, strictly between
ourselves, that my translation is execrable.  I am sorry to say I am no
magician.

"O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive!  Open your arms to the son,
prodigal and weary.

"I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from
us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery. . . .
OEdipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust,
regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to
you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!"



THE ASCENDING EFFORT--1910


Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has
destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry.
Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have
gone on singing in a sweet strain.  How they dare do the impossible and
virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation.
Not yet.  We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan.  As
somebody--perhaps a publisher--said lately: "Poetry is of no account now-
a-days."

But it is not totally neglected.  Those persons with gold-rimmed
spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have
remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given
to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the
popular mind.  Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove,
that Erasmus Darwin wrote _The Loves of the Plants_ and a scoffer _The
Loves of the Triangles_, poets have been supposed to be indecorously
blind to the progress of science.  What tribute, for instance, has poetry
paid to electricity?  All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr.
Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: "Hung with the globes of some
unnatural fruit."

Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but
inarticulate way the glories of science.  Poetry does not play its part.
Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes
poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table.  Here I am
reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose.  Mr. H.
G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was
inspired a few years ago to write a short story, _Under the Knife_.  Out
of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured
for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the
Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment
Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the
words: "There shall be no more pain!"  I advise you to look up that
story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose
whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most
perverse moments of scorn for things as they are.  His poetic imagination
is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say.
But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet--were he born
without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten
her down to a wretched piece of paper.

* * * * *

The book {6} which in the course of the last few days I have opened and
shut several times is not imaginative.  But, on the other hand, it is not
a dumb book, as some are.  It has even a sort of sober and serious
eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter.
Mr. Bourne begins his _Ascending Effort_ with a remark by Sir Francis
Galton upon Eugenics that "if the principles he was advocating were to
become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience,
like a new religion."  "Introduced" suggests compulsory vaccination.  Mr.
Bourne, who is not a theologian, wishes to league together not science
and religion, but science and the arts.  "The intoxicating power of art,"
he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the
doctrines of science.  In uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing
once upon a time a part in "popularising the Christian tenets."  With
painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so
persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science.  Until
that day dawns, science will continue to be lame and poetry blind.  He
himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that "a
really prudent people would be greedy of beauty," and their public
authorities "as careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation."

As the writer of those remarkable rustic note-books, _The Bettesworth
Book_ and _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, the author has a claim upon our
attention.  But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching
sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more.
He is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by it, until he has been
bewildered into awe.  He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and
its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic
vitality, and is a movement of life-cells with their matchless
unintellectual knowledge.  But the fact that poetry does not seem
obviously in love with science has never made him doubt whether it may
not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage ceremony
performed amid public rejoicings.

Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the
sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously
with a waggling motion like a top about to fall.  This is the Copernican
system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much
about it as its name.  But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief;
he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs
and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of
mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy.  He holds it without
knowing it.  In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand
undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do
after reading Mr. Bourne's book; he writes, therefore, as if neither
truths nor book existed.  Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will
not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science.  Some day, without
a doubt,--and it may be a consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it--fully
informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies's poem on a dark woman
combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of
appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats's "Had I the heaven's embroidered
cloths" came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its
respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and
comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.

There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are
alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining--and this
is one of them.  "Many a man prides himself" says Mr. Bourne, "on his
piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be
investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have
been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some
timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living
selection of his hereditary taste."  This extract is a fair sample of the
book's thought and of its style.  But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that
"persuasion" is a vain thing.  The appreciation of great art comes from
within.

It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of Mr.
Bourne's purpose is undeniable.  But the whole book is simply an earnest
expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes,
this one seems of little dynamic value--besides being impracticable.

Yes, indeed.  Art has served Religion; artists have found the most
exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of Transfiguration
which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is
not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our
infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope
for the unessential among invincible shadows.



THE CENSOR OF PLAYS--AN APPRECIATION--1907


A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play--and I lived
long enough to accomplish the task.  We live and learn.  When the play
was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance.
Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays.  I may say
without vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by
that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time
and space, and I was aware of being in England--in the twentieth-century
England.  The fact did not fit the date and the place.  That was my first
thought.  It was, in short, an improper fact.  I beg you to believe that
I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.

Therefore I don't say inappropriate.  I say improper--that is: something
to be ashamed of.  And at first this impression was confirmed by the
obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact
had its being.  The Censor of Plays!  His name was not in the mouths of
all men.  Far from it.  He seemed stealthy and remote.  There was about
that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a
Mandarin's back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch
when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final
certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience.

It was a disagreeable impression.  But I reflected that probably the
censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival,
since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but
an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved
because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart from any
intrinsic value; one more object of exotic _virtu_, an Oriental
_potiche_, a _magot chinois_ conceived by a childish and extravagant
imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of
the upper shelf.

Thus I quieted my uneasy mind.  Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the
fate of my one-act play.  The play was duly produced, and an
exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards.  It
ceased to exist.  It was a fair and open execution.  But having survived
the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I continued to exist,
labouring under no sense of wrong.  I was not pleased, but I was content.
I was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public,
judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and
conscientious servant--the artist.

Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved--not to
speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the
man.  I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public.  To the self-
respect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being
made and I join in it with all my heart.

For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish
figure, the _magot chinois_ whom I believed to be but a memorial of our
forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque _potiche_, works!  The
absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of
(surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions.  It heaves its
stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the
censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs
its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper shelf.  Less
picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in
this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no
countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more malevolent,
inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas
the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd
unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an
artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.

This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western
Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr. Stiggins's plug
hat and umbrella, is with us.  It is an office.  An office of trust.  And
from time to time there is found an official to fill it.  He is a public
man.  The least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most
obscure if not the most modest.

But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in
his life.  His office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade
beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny
of every sort flourishes.  Its holder need not have either brain or
heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of compassion.
He needs not these things.  He has power.  He can kill thought, and
incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live
in a dramatic form.  He can do it, without seeing, without understanding,
without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an
irresponsible Roman Caesar could kill a senator.  He can do that and
there is no one to say him nay.  He may call his cook (Moliere used to do
that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a
matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer
of men's honest work.  He may have a glass too much.  This accident has
happened to persons of unimpeachable morality--to gentlemen.  He may
suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius.  He may . . . what might
he not do!  I tell you he is the Caesar of the dramatic world.  There has
been since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power
to compare with the office of the Censor of Plays.

Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the
odious and the absurd.  This figure in whose power it is to suppress an
intellectual conception--to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my
masters!)--seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the
greatness of a Philistine's conceit and his moral cowardice.

But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there
can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post.  It is a matter
for meditation.  Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion
in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must
be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.

He must be unconscious.  It is one of the qualifications for his
magistracy.  Other qualifications are equally easy.  He must have done
nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing.  He must be obscure,
insignificant and mediocre--in thought, act, speech and sympathy.  He
must know nothing of art, of life--and of himself.  For if he did he
would not dare to be what he is.  Like that much questioned and
mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his
predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of
wondering generations.

And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words
but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.

"Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I
felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions,
I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the
development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind.
With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated, whispering to myself 'What if
I were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.'"

Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre--dramatist and dramatic
critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the Republic of Letters;
a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the light of
day, with the authority of a European reputation.  But then M. Jules
Lemaitre is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine
conscience--not an obscure hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr.
Stiggins's plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother--the
State.

Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf?  It
has stood too long there.  Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by some Board
of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of
Moscow--I suppose.  It is outlandish.  It is not venerable.  It does not
belong here.  Is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some
implement appropriate to its worth and status?  With an old broom handle
for instance.




PART II--LIFE


AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905


From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the fate of
the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the balance for more
than a fortnight.  The famous three-day battles, for which history has
reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance
before the struggles in Manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts
of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and
dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate
persistence, and end--as we have seen them end more than once--not from
the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal
weariness of the combatants.

We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold,
silent, colourless print of books and newspapers.  In stigmatising the
printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of
putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have
provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria.  I only
wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East
has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible
and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the
perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official
reticence, through the veil of inadequate words.  Inadequate, I say,
because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,
and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the
real progress of humanitarian ideas.  Direct vision of the fact, or the
stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy
with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the
senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which
reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself
under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a
purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering.  In this age of knowledge
our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate
triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to
information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed.  As to
the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the
futility of precision without force.  It is the exploded superstition of
enthusiastic statisticians.  An over-worked horse falling in front of our
windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the streets awaken more
genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of
reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying
bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of
thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen
ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of
survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by
fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.

An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist, looking
out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street--perhaps Fleet Street
itself--full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept
for joy at seeing so much life.  These arcadian tears, this facile
emotion worthy of the golden age, comes to us from the past, with solemn
approval, after the close of the Napoleonic wars and before the series of
sanguinary surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our
hopeful grandfathers.  We may well envy them their optimism of which this
anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme
instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the
spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant
at last in the felicity of her children.  Moreover, the psychology of
individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects the general
effect of the fears and hopes of its time.  Wept for joy!  I should think
that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort.  One
could not imagine anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life
in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a
general staff or a popular politician, with a career yet to make.  And
hardly even that.  In the case of the first tears would be
unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the
provision of so much food for powder more in accord with the rules of
prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in
weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors' views
upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of
their votes.

No!  It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much as
ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back.  The end of
the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal
mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded like a bombshell.  In
its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the inferiority of minds, of
military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless
vividness.  And there is but little courage in saying at this time of the
day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its
destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon.  The
parentage of that great social and political upheaval was intellectual,
the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its
royal form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from
its solitary throne to work its will among the people.  It is a king
whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at
the cost of degradation.  The degradation of the ideas of freedom and
justice at the root of the French Revolution is made manifest in the
person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been
the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a
sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe which did, indeed, for
some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse.  The subtle and
manifold influence for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of
violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of
obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot
well be exaggerated.

The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a
corrupted revolution.  It may be said that the twentieth begins with a
war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet
emerge a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and
dreaded phantom.  For a hundred years the ghost of Russian might,
overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western
Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from
light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried
millions of Russian people.  Not the most determined cockney
sentimentalist could have had the heart to weep for joy at the thought of
its teeming numbers!  And yet they were living, they are alive yet,
since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing
crimson upon the snow of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since
their generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the
ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to send
up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calling for
vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without
intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks
of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder--till their ghastly labour, worthy
of a place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, passing through
the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of
crazy despair.

It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of
sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery.  Great numbers of
soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against
the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly among the Russians, of
course.  The Japanese have in their favour the tonic effect of success;
and the innate gentleness of their character stands them in good stead.
But the Japanese grand army has yet another advantage in this
nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, arduous toil of killing
surpasses all the wars of history.  It has a base for its operations; a
base of a nature beyond the concern of the many books written upon the so-
called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of
human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices.
The Japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind
it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to be appeased
at the cost of so much blood and treasure.  And in that belief, whether
well or ill founded, that army stands on the high ground of conscious
assent, shouldering deliberately the burden of a long-tried faithfulness.
The other people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a
miserable quietude resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed,
without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel
nothing but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become
the plaything of a black and merciless fate.

The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the
memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the one
forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness
into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a full knowledge of
its past and its future, "finding itself" as it were at every step of the
trying war before the eyes of an astonished world.  The greatness of the
lesson has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half-conscious
prejudice of race-difference.  The West having managed to lodge its hasty
foot on the neck of the East, is prone to forget that it is from the East
that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who
set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of
meditation.  It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a
cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had
little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the military
situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same
everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and
Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical
record--since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional
expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours
of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions.  All
this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time
as this--the time of a great war.  More legitimate in view of the
situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of
events after the war.  More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the
irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace
that do not matter.

And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old, hundred
years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe from across the
teeming graves of Russian people.  This dreaded and strange apparition,
bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images;
that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a
blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still
faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance,
stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already
cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,
already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a
resurrection.

Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into
the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even
believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted,
starved souls of its people.  This is the real object-lesson of this war,
its unforgettable information.  And this war's true mission, disengaged
from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from
the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the
ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East--its
true mission was to lay a ghost.  It has accomplished it.  Whether
Kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next
year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses
will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations.  The task of
Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is
laid.  Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent,
seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the
twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition
has vanished--never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze
at it with vague dread and many misgivings.

It was a fascination.  And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable
in its persistence as in its duration.  It seems so unaccountable, that
the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia
will or will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether
it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under seventy millions of
sacrificed peasants' caps (as her Press boasted a little more than a year
ago) or give up to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together
with some other things; whether, perchance, as an interesting
alternative, it will make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond
the Oxus.

All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print;
and if they have been gravely considered by only one reader out of each
hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the
composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the
columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of
feverish credulity.  The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still
uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of
genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of
having something exciting to talk about.

The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our
middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great--who imagined that
all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom--can do nothing.
It can do nothing because it does not exist.  It has vanished for ever at
last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-
omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in
reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a
monument of fear and oppression.

The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a contemptible
source.  It is a matter of logical growth, of faith and courage.  Its
inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people,
governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the
wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the reward of gratitude.  Many
States have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great--as
yet.  That the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of
its development can be seen only historically, is true.  Perhaps mankind
has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular
case.  Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth
shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of
statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting
with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State.  It is
even possible that we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether:
that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances.
But whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or
our admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the
magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven
out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its
retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy
supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the
mere brute force of numbers.

This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's feelings and
reason that the downfall of Russia's might is unavoidable.  Spectral it
lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single
generous deed, of a single service rendered--even involuntarily--to the
polity of nations.  Other despotisms there have been, but none whose
origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of
whose end was so gruesomely ignoble.  What is amazing is the myth of its
irresistible strength which is dying so hard.

* * * * *

Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe seems the most
baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by
diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if
the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the
main characteristic of the management of international relations.  A
glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say
the logical, powerlessness of Russia.  As a military power it has never
achieved by itself a single great thing.  It has been indeed able to
repel an ill-considered invasion, but only by having recourse to the
extreme methods of desperation.  In its attacks upon its specially
selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right
hand.  All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time
to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a
well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism.  Even the half-
armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the
Tsardom.  It was victorious only against the practically disarmed, as, in
regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will
prove sufficiently.  As an ally, Russia has been always unprofitable,
taking her share in the defeats rather than in the victories of her
friends, but always pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an
arbiter of military success.  She has been unable to help to any purpose
a single principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority
and legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to rest
under his special protection; just as Nicholas the Second has tried to
make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive affair.  And the
first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the belief in the sacredness
of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive
the first shock of doubt.  Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end
of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe.  It threw the
way open for the liberation of Italy.  The war in Manchuria makes an end
of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind
a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts.  In the space of
fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the
self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the Augustulus of the
_regime_ that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign
Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen
victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to
the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak
and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the
confines of two continents.

That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the
monster it is impossible to believe.  But of the many who must have seen,
all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak;
or else were too insignificant to be heard or believed.  Yet not all.

In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his post
of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called--so the story goes--upon
another distinguished diplomatist.  After some talk upon the general
situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire remarked that it
was his practice to resume the impressions he had carried out of every
country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he
caused to be engraved upon some trinket.  "I am leaving this country now,
and this is what I bring away from it," he continued, taking off his
finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside: "La
Russie, c'est le neant."

Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest
nor too discreet to speak out.  Certainly he was not afraid of not being
believed.  Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops.  He
meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has
set the clock of peace back for many a year.

He had his way.  The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more
than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy left to the world
by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.

It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,
astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the
East has always been famous.  The pretence of belief in its existence
will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead)
unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this
_Neant_ making an armed descent upon the plains of India.  That sort of
folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the
real problem created for Europe by a war in the Far East.

For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to
remain a _Neant_ for many long years, in a more even than a Bismarckian
sense.  The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to
consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in Central
Europe by its help and connivance.

The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always
amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first
instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible
obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion.  There is a removal
of that latent feeling of restraint which the presence of a powerful
neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is
bound to inspire.  The common guilt of the two Empires is defined
precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces.
Without indulging in excessive feelings of indignation at that country's
partition, or going so far as to believe--with a late French
politician--in the "immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a
material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction,
contains the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two
partners in iniquity--whatever the iniquity is.  Germany has been the
evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish problem.
Always urging the adoption of the most repressive measures with a
perfectly logical duplicity, Prince Bismarck's Empire has taken care to
couple the neighbourly offers of military assistance with merciless
advice.  The thought of the Polish provinces accepting a frank
reconciliation with a humanised Russia and bringing the weight of
homogeneous loyalty within a few miles of Berlin, has been always
intensely distasteful to the arrogant Germanising tendencies of the other
partner in iniquity.  And, besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads
over the Niemen and over the Vistula.

And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal disturbances
destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in Russia, the road over
these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting aspect.  At any moment the
pretext of armed intervention may be found in a revolutionary outbreak
provoked by Socialists, perhaps--but at any rate by the political
immaturity of the enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of
the Russian people.  The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and
painful.  This is not the place to speculate upon the nature of these
convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable
tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative--certainly
of the territorial--unity.

Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in Russia is
already past.  This is the superficial view of the more profound truth
that for Russia there has never been such a time within the memory of
mankind.  It is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a
phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has never been anything
else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back
as to a parting of ways.

In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its
historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution
of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time; by
the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the
standard of monarchical power these larger, agglomerations of mankind.
This service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing
the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has
prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for
the solidarity of Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the
advent of Concord and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the
fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been,
and remains, the only possible goal of our progress.

The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and
aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old monarchies of Europe,
which were the creations of historical necessity.  There were seeds of
wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses.  They had a past and a future;
they were human.  But under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could
grow.  Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no historical past,
and it cannot hope for a historical future.  It can only end.  By no
industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can it
be presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a State,
must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny.  It lies
outside the stream of progress.  This despotism has been utterly
un-European.  Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature.  Oriental
despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace
on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by
their art, by the exploits of great conquerors.  The record of their rise
and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their
course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial
temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism.  The Russian
autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart.  It is impossible to assign
to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities,
or the aspirations of mankind.  That despotism has neither an European
nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the
institutions or the follies of this earth.  What strikes one with a sort
of awe is just this something inhuman in its character.  It is like a
visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon
the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of
two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or
of the West.

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an
awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to
her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to
understand by Europe.  From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence
as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found
nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning
and end of her organisation.  Hence arises her impenetrability to
whatever is true in Western thought.  Western thought, when it crosses
her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a
noxious parody of itself.  Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her
national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of
the world.  The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing
else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of
slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless
fatalism.  It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental
activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating
assertion of purity and holiness.  The Government of Holy Russia,
arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the
bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to
those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation.  The
worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at
bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of
innumerable minds.  The greatest horror of the world--madness--walked
faithfully in its train.  Some of the best intellects of Russia, after
struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the
feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss.  An
attentive survey of Russia's literature, of her Church, of her
administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the
verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on
a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very
inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of
rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the
imperative condition of her existence.  The great governmental secret of
that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to
call _Le Neant_, has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope.  To
pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, which is
precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome
pleasantry.  There can be no evolution out of a grave.  Another word of
less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection
with Russia's future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as
much as of hope--Revolution.

In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung
instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn
forebodings.  More or less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a
spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of
greatness.  And there will be nothing of what she expects.  She will see
neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of
generous greatness.  Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed,
give the measure of her ignorance of that _Neant_ which for so many years
had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.

_Neant_!  In a way, yes!  And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself
be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact
form.  The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved
within a ring.  If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately.  The
saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to
destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that
could not deceive his genius.  Prince Bismarck has been really
complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might.  There is an
awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _Neant_--and in
Russia there is no idea.  She is not a _Neant_, she is and has been
simply the negation of everything worth living for.  She is not an empty
void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards
personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling
desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience.  Those that
have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal
conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift
impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that
there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree
serve even the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready
for a revolution.  The sin of the old European monarchies was not the
absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to
alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the
march of time.  Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into
oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions
sooner, perhaps, than any other.  It has not been the business of
monarchies to be adaptive from within.  With the mission of uniting and
consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in
favour of a larger conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness,
force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action,
they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set
in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve.  Yet,
for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant,
perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived.  The revolutions of
European States have never been in the nature of absolute protests _en
masse_ against the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of the
people against the oppressive degeneration of legality.  But there never
has been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of
everything else that has its root in reason or conscience.  The ground of
every revolution had to be intellectually prepared.  A revolution is a
short cut in the rational development of national needs in response to
the growth of world-wide ideals.  It is conceivably possible for a
monarch of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without
ceasing to be the king of his people.  For the autocracy of Holy Russia
the only conceivable self-reform is--suicide.

The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler and his
helpless people.  Wielders of a power purchased by an unspeakable
baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar horde, the Princes of
Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard
themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe, have never risen to be
the chiefs of a nation.  Their authority has never been sanctioned by
popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of
political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the power of the
sword.  In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her
end, it can never be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to
mankind.  It cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves.  It is a
tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who
had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth
about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the
capricious will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in
the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver, with the
wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least the force
of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown Spartacus.

A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon Russian
achievements; and the coming events of her internal changes, however
appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive
than the convulsions of a colossal body.  As her boasted military force
that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no other but faltering
blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master
with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on
awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having
first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech.  It is
safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain
clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of
bare feet.

That would be the beginning.  What is to come after?  The conquest of
freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to
excellence.  We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the
time to forget how little that freedom means.  To Russia it must seem
everything.  A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his
hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates.  It
appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas
what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of
freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the
endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his
future with no other material but what he can find within himself.

It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of
collective wisdom.  Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old
tradition disconsolately exclaimed) "il n'y a plus d'Europe!"  There is,
indeed, no Europe.  The idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her
dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna
Congress through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions,
has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals.
Instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of
nationalities much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front,
and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.
Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are
alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and
mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year,
almost with the event of every passing month.  This is the atmosphere
Russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down.
But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of
day?  An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia's allies has
found that it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for a
shadow.  It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest
that the modern world had ever known--and the most overbearing.  But it
is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its
place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction, and no
doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the
moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the
French people.

Two neighbours Russia will find at her door.  Austria, traditionally
unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of
uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an
uncertain, bilingual phrase.  Prussia, grown in something like forty
years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil
counsellor of Russia's masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong
hand to the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only
with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her
substance.

Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything
but a _Neant_ where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves
without sound or trace.  It is a powerful and voracious organisation,
full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement
will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed
members of its friends and neighbours.  The era of wars so eloquently
denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic
ambitions is by no means over yet.  They will be fought out differently,
with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-
and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence.  They will make us regret
the time of dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by
prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and
the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency.  For, if the
monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each other as
"brother" in autograph communications, that relationship was at least as
effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be established between the
rival nations of this continent, which, we are assured on all hands, is
the heritage of democracy.  In the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the
reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag
on unscrupulous desires of glory or greed.  Besides, there was always the
common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's
divine right.  No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the
sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his
power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in
calling brother the leader of another democracy--a chief as fatherless
and heirless as himself.

The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon's half-generous,
half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities, was the first
war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the
tune of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic thoroughness.  Was
it not that excellent bourgeoise, Princess Bismarck (to keep only to
great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and
children--emphatically the children, too--of the abominable French nation
massacred off the face of the earth?  This illustration of the new war-
temper is artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable Busch, the
Chancellor's pet "reptile" of the Press.  And this was supposed to be a
war for an idea!  Too much, however, should not be made of that good
wife's and mother's sentiments any more than of the good First Emperor
William's tears, shed so abundantly after every battle, by letter,
telegram, and otherwise, during the course of the same war, before a dumb
and shamefaced continent.  These were merely the expressions of the
simplicity of a nation which more than any other has a tendency to run
into the grotesque.  There is worse to come.

To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the short
era of national wars seems about to close.  No war will be waged for an
idea.  The "noxious idle aristocracies" of yesterday fought without
malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun of the thing.  The
virtuous, industrious democratic States of to-morrow may yet be reduced
to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and
fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue.  The
dreams sanguine humanitarians raised almost to ecstasy about the year
fifty of the last century by the moving sight of the Crystal
Palace--crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it seems to be
the bizarre fate of humanity to produce for the benefit of a few
employers of labour--have vanished as quickly as they had arisen.  The
golden hopes of peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in
every drawer of every benevolent theorist's writing table.  A swift
disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which could put its
trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition.

Industrialism and commercialism--wearing high-sounding names in many
languages (_Welt-politik_ may serve for one instance) picking up coins
behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides
have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches--stand
ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the
earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so.  And
democracy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of
material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end,
on a mere pittance--unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional ability
and overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through an international
understanding for the delimitation of spheres of trade all over the
earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked in
Africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger
(as a buying machine) from flying prematurely at each other's throats.

This seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance of
European peace, with its alliances based on mutual distrust, preparedness
for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so far,
than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee.  The true peace of the
world will be a place of refuge much less like a beleaguered fortress and
more, let us hope, in the nature of an Inviolable Temple.  It will be
built on less perishable foundations than those of material interests.
But it must be confessed that the architectural aspect of the universal
city remains as yet inconceivable--that the very ground for its erection
has not been cleared of the jungle.

Never before in history has the right of war been more fully admitted in
the rounded periods of public speeches, in books, in public prints, in
all the public works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the
Hague Tribunal--that solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a
House of Strife.  To him whose indignation is qualified by a measure of
hope and affection, the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation
present a sight of alarming comicality.  After clinging for ages to the
steps of the heavenly throne, they are now, without much modifying their
attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the
thunderbolts of their Jupiter.  They have removed war from the list of
Heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they have
erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of war,
pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the Roman
Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and
have made it into a calm and regulated institution.  At first sight the
change does not seem for the better.  Jove's thunderbolt looks a most
dangerous plaything in the hands of the people.  But a solemnly
established institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion,
abuse, worship, and execration of men.  It grows obsolete, odious, and
intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured old age.

Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to help
its prospects is to provide in the fullest, frankest way for the
conditions of the present day.  War is one of its conditions; it is its
principal condition.  It lies at the heart of every question agitating
the fears and hopes of a humanity divided against itself.  The succeeding
ages have changed nothing except the watchwords of the armies.  The
intellectual stage of mankind being as yet in its infancy, and States,
like most individuals, having but a feeble and imperfect consciousness of
the worth and force of the inner life, the need of making their existence
manifest to themselves is determined in the direction of physical
activity.  The idea of ceasing to grow in territory, in strength, in
wealth, in influence--in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge--is
odious to them as the omen of the end.  Action, in which is to be found
the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our uneasy vanity
and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future--a sentiment concealed,
indeed, but proving its existence by the force it has, when invoked, to
stir the passions of a nation.  It will be long before we have learned
that in the great darkness before us there is nothing that we need fear.
Let us act lest we perish--is the cry.  And the only form of action open
to a State can be of no other than aggressive nature.

There are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is one
and the same--the magazine rifle of the latest pattern.  In preparation
for or against that form of action the States of Europe are spending now
such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch from the labours of
factory and counting-house.

Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men, and
reigned with less disputed sway in their minds.  It has harnessed science
to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few respectable manufacturers,
scattered doles of food and raiment amongst a few thousand skilled
workmen, devoured the first youth of whole generations, and reaped its
harvest of countless corpses.  It has perverted the intelligence of men,
women, and children, and has made the speeches of Emperors, Kings,
Presidents, and Ministers monotonous with ardent protestations of
fidelity to peace.  Indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has
modelled it on its own image: a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of
peace, with a mailed fist, and turned-up moustaches, ringing with the din
of grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms;
it has made peace so magnificent as to be almost as expensive to keep up
as itself.  It has sent out apostles of its own, who at one time went
about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity
of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor
in mind--whose name is legion.

It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of
culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden extinction.
Let us hope it is so.  Yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a
long time breaking above a dark horizon.  War is with us now; and,
whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again.  And it is
the way of true wisdom for men and States to take account of things as
they are.

Civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose
growth it is responsible.  It has managed to remove the sights and sounds
of battlefields away from our doorsteps.  But it cannot be expected to
achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance.  Some
day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly
unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy.  It is
not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will _not_ be
a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the Oxus.

The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the Russia of
the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be the Russia of to-
day.  It will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims.  It is
even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and
unbroken.  All speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events
made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title
to existence was the invincible power of military conquest.  That
autocratic Russia will have a miserable end in harmony with its base
origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt.  The problem of
the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the
approaching fact of its disappearance.

The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only
accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important mission
in the world's struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created
a situation.  They have created a situation in the East which they are
competent to manage by themselves; and in doing this they have brought
about a change in the condition of the West with which Europe is not well
prepared to deal.  The common ground of concord, good faith and justice
is not sufficient to establish an action upon; since the conscience of
but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will
brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a
material advantage.  And eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of
human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted.  The
trouble of the civilised world is the want of a common conservative
principle abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form
the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint
of particular ambitions.  Peace tribunals instituted for the greater
glory of war will not replace it.  Whether such a principle exists--who
can say?  If it does not, then it ought to be invented.  A sage with a
sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without
loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be
given the task of preparing the minds.  So far there is no trace of such
a principle anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very
effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of national
aspirations.  _Il n'y a plus d'Europe_--there is only an armed and
trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for
life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions.  There are
also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious
acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of
the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean--not yet--and
whose head is very high up--in Pomerania, the breeding place of such
precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote)
would not have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the
old Eastern Question.  But times have changed, since, by way of keeping
up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant of the
Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new
Emperor.

Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a
possible re-grouping of European Powers.  The alliance of the three
Empires is supposed possible.  And it may be possible.  The myth of
Russia's power is dying very hard--hard enough for that combination to
take place--such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers
will still exercise upon the imagination of a people trained to the
worship of force.  Germany may be willing to lend its support to a
tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a
preponderating voice in the settlement of every question in that south-
east of Europe which merges into Asia.  No principle being involved in
such an alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand
in the way of Germany's other ambitions.  The fall of autocracy would
bring its restraint automatically to an end.  Thus it may be believed
that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble friend
and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is supposed to
be the mark of German superiority.  Russia weakened down to the second
place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her
regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of German policy--which
are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is
the same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to
right and justice, either in the East or in the West.  For that and no
other is the true note of your _Welt-politik_ which desires to live.

The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so
much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the
earth, as simply for something good to get.  He gazes upon the land and
upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late
a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass.  He gazes north and
south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the
waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue.  The disappearance of the
Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the _Welt-
politik_.  According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial
impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the
_pickelhaubes_ peeping out grimly from behind.  Germany's attitude proves
that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material
interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim,
ideal, and watchword.  For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at
the passing away of the Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old
Man of the Sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul
in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor
Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the
"immanent justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning
that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
"Le Prussianisme--voila l'ennemi!"



THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919


At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had
become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime.
This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe;
the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit
that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible
and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt.  As to Russia, the third
party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national
conscience at the time.  The will of its rulers was always accepted by
the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God.
As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply
in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and
there was the opportunity to get hold of it.  Catherine the Great looked
upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction.  Her
political argument that the destruction of Poland meant the repression of
revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in
Europe was a characteristically impudent pretence.  There may have been
minds here and there amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only
felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic,
Russia approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased,
at least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.

It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a
great part in Europe.  To such statesmen as she had then that act of
brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom.  The
King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished
simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much
less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that
time Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and
more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian
illusions.  Morally, the Republic was in a state of ferment and
consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social
reform.  The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I
mean the comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces.
But, probably from innate inclination towards treachery, Frederick of
Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception.
Appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered
deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the Republic, and then,
before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest
decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes.

As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction.  They
cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a measure
sincere.  They arose from a vivid perception that Austria's allotted
share of the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of
strength and territory to the other two Powers.  Austria did not really
want an extension of territory at the cost of Poland.  She could not hope
to improve her frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of
Galicia, a province whose natural resources were undeveloped and whose
salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her
own.  No doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very
distasteful to the conservative monarchy; Austrian statesmen did see at
the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the
West, in France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would be
needed for its suppression.  But the movement towards a _partage_ on the
part of Russia and Prussia was too definite to be resisted, and Austria
had to follow their lead in the destruction of a State which she would
have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against Prussian and
Russian ambitions.  It may be truly said that the destruction of Poland
secured the safety of the French Revolution.  For when in 1795 the crime
was consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner and was in a state
to defend itself against the forces of reaction.

In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of
liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland.  On an
impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was
relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so.  But
France's geographical position made her much less vulnerable.  She had no
powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a
conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy
lot.  The only States which dreaded the contamination of the new
principles and had enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and
Russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in
defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an immediate
satisfaction to their cupidity.  They made their choice, and the untold
sufferings of a nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate
for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.

Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the
course of history.  Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is
only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their
hearts.  It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an
enterprise the victims do not count.  As an emotional outlet for the
oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and
then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body
into three pieces.  There was really nothing to do but to drop a few
tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave.  But the spirit of
the nation refused to rest therein.  It haunted the territories of the
Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion
where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed,
and pooh-pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a
strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors.  Poland
deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its
religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere
geographical expression.  And even that, itself, seemed strangely vague,
had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories
and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy
conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction,
were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime.  What
was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation,
stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold.  That
persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to
the rest of Europe also.  It would intrude its irresistible claim into
every problem of European politics, into the theory of European
equilibrium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian question,
the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the doctrine of
nationalities.  That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls
uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved
indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-
rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows.  It
would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine
railleries of Gorchakov.

As a Polish friend observed to me some years ago: "Till the year '48 the
Polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient ra

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